Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday May 22, 2014 @05:16PM
from the better-than-nothing dept.

First time accepted submitter strangeintp (892348) writes "The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121. The bill's authors concede it was watered down significantly in recent days but insist it will still outlaw the practice of bulk collection of US telephone metadata by the NSA first revealed by Snowden."

You mean if you were in Congress, you wouldn't be afraid of the NSA? I'm afraid of them, and I'm just a regular guy with no power.

If you are afraid of the NSA, you have no job being in congress, and/or your primary goal should be to shut it the fuck down, because if an arm of the executive has the legislative so afraid that it can control them, then you're not living in a democracy anymore. For a free country. You're living in a military dictatorship.

With their numbers, Congress can ram his veto wherever they choose. If they change the bill to be meaningless, we can only assume they are all compromised by NSA spying and should be voted out of office ASAP.

From what I've heard of what passed, not only does it NOT have any teeth to it, but it is written so broadly that with secret judges giving secret interpretations (even the secret judges don't consult with each other I"m led to believe), this could likely give the NSA and other TLA agencies *more* leeway to get creative in the work of crushing the US citizens' rights.

C'mon folks, no matter who is currently in office, D or R, please this time around vote for anyone other than the incumbent, and let's sweep the house and senate clean over the next couple years and start from scratch.

That link is a bunch of lies and hyperbole. The ACLU still supports it because some reform is better than none. They're way more important the ones listed, and yet the link claims that every civil liberties group withdrew support.

Shows the quality of the position.

And he was talking about actually reading it and identifying what parts you don't like, NOT just finding a random propaganda link that is against.

C'mon folks, no matter who is currently in office, D or R, please this time around vote for anyone other than the incumbent, and let's sweep the house and senate clean over the next couple years and start from scratch.

Oh god. Not this again. What makes you think the replacements will be any better? This whole "vote for change because change is good" is such bullshit. If you are going to vote at least do it intelligently. It's voting blindly without thought that has gotten us into this situation in the first place.

If you are going to vote for someone at least vote for someone who makes specific promises about how he would vote in this sort of critical law and what he promises to do to himself if he votes the wrong way. Su

Oh god. Not this again. What makes you think the replacements will be any better? This whole "vote for change because change is good" is such bullshit. If you are going to vote at least do it intelligently. It's voting blindly without thought that has gotten us into this situation in the first place.

The message sent by this is that congressmen can do whatever they like, as they're going to get re-elected no matter how much they work against the public's interests.. It also makes bribery (via gifts, campaign contributions, and lucrative jobs upon leaving office) quite affordable.

The re-election rate is so high because of gerrymandering, and both parties do it.

Put all the Democrats in one district, and all the Republicans in another, and then one of the effects is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have to worry much about winning their district. Another of the effects is that campaigns are much more polarized. If everyone in your district is majority Republican then you start off shooting right down the middle of that demographic, which doe

a brand new party brought to power due entirely to the population's displeasure with the previous party will realize that they had better mind their Ps and Qs least they go out just as fast as they came in.

That's assuming that it's a new party, and not just a new member of the existing party. Why would you care that you'd be voted out in the next election if you already had some cushy directorships lined up thanks to your work in the current term?

On the plus side, anyone who voted for it cannot support anti-Snowden actions without looking completely stupid. That might have meant something back in the days when media asked questions.

But in the days when unlimited funds can create attack messages for anyone, this vote basically says yes to Snowden, and no to either the Obama administration or the Presidency in general depending on which party they want to appeal to.

The political process is slow, and I honestly did not expect even this much so far. I

I think there were other reasons to vote against it, if only because Lloyd Doggett is one of the most liberal members of the house.

Indeed, daily kos calls the watered-down bill "an authorization of domestic spying in violation of the 4th amendment" and is congratulating the 121 members who had the backbone to vote against it.

So I think your attack on (at least part of) the 121 is unfounded; they are a mix of those who refused to authorize spying with those who thought existing law was great. Likewise, the 303 who approved are probably a mix of those who thought this "reining in" was better than nothing, along with the truly evil who did the closed-door rewrite to make it mostly ineffective.

Lloyd Doggett is a stand up gent and the only elected official that I am proud to say represents me. He sponsored the bill to close the NSA "backdoor" [congress.gov], and he's typically on the right side of these issues. I'm not surprised he voted against this faux reform bill.

Dude, the fucking sponsor was among the nays. It wasn't "watered down": it was castrated and then turned into a pro-NSA bill that continues the status quo and adds more time in for parts of the PATRIOT act. We should find out who did that to this bill and piblicize their names with infamy from now until the next election.

Its funny, during the last election I made a facebook comment about us being serfs; and an old friend of mine who has spent entirely more time than leads to employability in the academic study of pre-rennassaince europe chimed in with quite a rant about how it was an insult to actual serfdom.

Your friend got shitty grades in those pre-renaissance Europe classes. The defining characteristic of the serf class was that people born serfs would live their entire lives as serfs and their children would too. There was no pathway to move up classes.

It's difficult to move up in classes in modern America, but it's possible. Two of our last three Presidents were raised by poor single mothers. Dr. Dre grew up in Compton and just made a billion dollars.

Actual serfs would have given anything for the rights, representation, and social mobility that we bitch about.

I'm sorry it's a stupid movie example, but the fact that a few from luck and/or skill get to move up doesn't make the rest of the system okay. It's like saying there's no oppression in The Hunger Games because game winners become rich celebrities.

Very few Americans ever manage to rise above the station they were born to. But they do get to work more hours than a serf with much less security. None of our last 3 presidents grew up in poverty though Clinton did see some rough patches and his home life wasn't all that good.

I recently had the chance to work with a "farmer boy." He never gets tired, he used to work 18's. On a hogfarm. Only people who have been around a real farm can appreciate that statement, because chicken shit is bad, but it's not that bad, cow shit is almost pleasant, but working in pig shit is just awful. A vegetable farm is a whole lot more enjoyable than most livestock farms, that is closed quarter livestock where the shit piles up deep, not open wild roaming cattle ranches, or other free range chicken p

This is all totally off-topic, but there is one part of your argument that merits discussion. Pointing out that a few people have experienced very lucrative social mobility is not evidence of the system as a whole being conducive to it. In fact, such arguments serve the exact opposite goal by thwarting meaningful discussion of social and economic policy. A handy thought experiment from Cracked makes it more clear:

Let's say there are a hundred of you and your friends all locked in a room, and you're all starving. I walk in, and out of my fat wallet I pull a wad of bills that it more money than you'd make in a year. I set it on a table, and say, "the last one of you left alive gets this pile of money." Then, when all your friends are dead, you get rich, and I say, "see? The system is fair: any one of you can become a rich person, if only you try hard enough. It deliberately conflates "any of you can get rich" with "all of you will get rich." And you and your friends are so busy fighting each other that nobody is asking why there was only money for one of you in the first place.

Dr. Dre may have become a billionaire, but he grew up in a neighborhood systematically ghettoized, and the majority of the kids he grew up with ended up dead or in jail, and almost all of them stayed poor.

Bullshit. Just because those rights were written on a piece of paper doesn't mean serfs actually saw any of those rights. If the Lord walked into your hut and raped your wife, what would you do? File a grievance with this advocate? Come on.

"You have the right to an attorney, if you cannot afford one, one will be provided to you."

I don't think commoners got protections against rape until after serfs were on the way out.

Serfs certainly had the Right to Justice, but that actually meant the right to have the Lord settle disputes with other serfs. The Lord's judgement was considered more important than a serf's life, so if he decided you needed to die, there was not any piece of paper to say otherwise. The Magna Carta established the right generally, but didn't ban killing a serf without cause; it only established the penalty of having

You don't have a special "right to an attorney" other than when a legal case is involved. The NSA isn't a law enforcement agency, that is why the right to an attorney doesn't come up; they don't accuse people of crimes. When NSA evidence is used by prosecutors in a real legal case, you'll have an attorney.

You probably just THINK you have different rights than what is actually IN the Constitution. Think about that.

And the serfs didn't have a right to an attorney. They did have a right to have some human spea

That fact that you can be killed during combat without a "judicial order" is always the way it was.;)And we know that is what you mean, because there is no other situation where Americans can be legally killed without a legal sentence.Before the Magna Carta, serfs didn't even have basic right to life. And even then the right to life only extended to requiring the Lord who killed you to educate your children. Serfs had certain rights, like a row to grow food. But a general right to life was generally not on

The actuality is that there were routes of upwards mobility for serfs as individuals. They were rarely successful, but they did exist. The military and the church.

It's also true that the legal rights, as well as the practical rights, of serfs differed from "country" to "country" as well as from century to century. (Countries, as such, didn't exist until the latter part of the middle ages, even though there were areas which later became countries. Counties, Barronies, and Fiefs are more about the early p

This isn't the Intelligence community vs the people. This is the Legislative vs the Executive. The intelligence community just does what the Executive branch of government tells it to do. Ultimately, this whole surveillance program was a construct by the Executive branch (started under Bush, continued and expanded under Obama), who got enough of the Legislature on board with it to pass the laws they needed to keep this quasi-legal.

Characterizing it as the intelligence community vs the people is precis

No matter whether that's true or false, in this instance the way the intelligence community has chosen to accomplish a goal runs directly counter to the interests of the people it is intended to protect, which is exactly what an enemy is.

"goal runs directly counter to the interests of the people it is intended to protect, "no it doesn't. Not at all.we can argue the constitutionality of it, and yes it's actually complex. But being able to track someone down that makes a threats is in your best interested.

Keith Alexander was lying because he cannot release top secret information in a public forum. IIRC he wrote to the head of the committee and basically said "I didn't tell you everything because you made this public."

You didn't really want an answer, but there it is. Is the only answer that Keith Alexander is acting in bad faith? What if there are actually people who believe they are doing the right thing? You might have scored a point against one guy, but there are rafts full of people who really do wan

Keith Alexander was lying because he cannot release top secret information in a public forum

That he cannot release top secret information in a public forum doesn't mean that the only other option he has is to lie. He could also say "I can't discuss that in a public forum." If he'd done that, he might have a shred of credibility left now. However, that he is fully willing to lie to Congress means that it's unwise to believe a single thing he says.

Prove it! To put it in simple terms: If you take the word of a known liar on good faith, you are an idiot.

Sure, I would agree that "some" of the people probably believe that they are doing a "good job", but that "job" has been defined by corrupt people who are proven to have spoken untrue statements under oath. They don't care about honesty, they care either about themselves and their ilk or an agenda which is being hidden from the Citizens of this Counrty.

Not everyone is your enemy just because you disagree on how to accomplish a goal.

The intelligence community isn't doing this in bad faith.The believe that this is what they have to do to protect "the People."

Even if that were true, you could say that about most of the evil tyrants throughout history. It doesn't mean what they're doing is actually what's best for the people. They believe it is because they believe that the more power they have, the more they can make things go their way, and that their way is the right way. Their actions are nothing more noble than a power grab.

The government has a long history of protecting the people from threats like the other party, dissidents, and other politically undesirables. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] for one example.

It includes those who try to subvert the principles this country is supposed to stand for, those who violate the highest law of the land, and those who claim to want us to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" and yet support policies and take actions that take us in the exact opposite direction.

They're not merely enemies of the people; they're enemies of the very concept of freedom.

Over the decades when exposed and required to be shut down:
The main operational software and hardware is removed and the teams reassigned.
The methods, data gathered and backups just end up at a different site, branch, agency under as a new or old project.
The classic "Total Information Awareness" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] would be a public example of this.

Everybody wins here, a bunch of people get to say they did something in the fight against the NSA. The Executive branch and those in the house who support invasive domestic spying get to keep the majority of their surveillance programs, and most importantly there isn't much more meaningful oversight so who actually knows if the NSA is following the rules. The Executive still gets to hide themselves behind national security letters, "state secrets", and special secret courts.

However I do not feel like this caused any meaningful change. Hopefully the nation remains outraged at the NSA and this is just the first step in fixing our domestic spying programs, but I feel like we get a few meaningless bills passed and then this issue goes away until the next Snowden.

The fact that your "everyone" doesn't include the citizenry is very indicative of the root of the problem. The people don't matter, only the politicians who are in power matter. These politicians are like teenagers: They have conveniently forgotten the first 3 words of the constitution that they promised to uphold.

They know everything about you; all it takes is a "gentle reminder" and this bill is turned into a termite-eaten stack of drivel.

I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...

If it really meant anything, this bill would have contained a passage giving Snowden immunity, as long as he testifies against everyone else inside the Govt that violated the constitution with respect to their illegal activities.

"It's not illegal when the President does it!" didn't work for Nixon, it should not have worked for Bush or Obama. Everyone should be in Jail, at this point, lol.

If it really meant anything, this bill would have contained a passage giving Snowden immunity, as long as he testifies against everyone else inside the Govt that violated the constitution with respect to their illegal activities.

I think there's a bit of false dichotomy there.

They know everything about you; all it takes is a "gentle reminder" and this bill is turned into a termite-eaten stack of drivel. I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...

The thing with cynicism in politics is that you get zero points for being right about how terrible things are or will be, and it just makes you feel even less like trying to change anything. So lets not say things like that out loud, please?

Start thinking locally.
Do you need that chat or VOIP product known to decrypt your messages on your computers?
Do you need that free or consumer OS known to decrypt your messages on your computers?
Do you need to invite that hardware vendor known to backdoor your servers next upgrade?
Do you still trust that crypto vendor known to trapdoor your communications system?
Are your staff really fully aware of what tame academia, hardware and software providers offered as robust crypto standards?
Does your histo

I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...

I doubt the NSA would roll out there (almost certainly existing) politicians-blackmail program for something like this. The much easier solution is to - ignore the bill. It's not like they are new to doing what is clearly illegal, nor lying to congress.

I see this more in the vein of many other laws which "clarify" already existing rules (heck, last I checked the NSA is forbidden by charta to spy on americans, so why this even needed a law is far beyond me).My favorite satirical news magazine, which was ofte

The bill basically says that metadata and data should not get collected without a warrant except when one thinks one has a reason. What kind of reason would count as an exception is not actually specified.

So while the previous practice was clearly illegal, this bill makes everything legal since it only applies the "but only if you think this a good idea" metric and clearly everybody already thought it was a good idea to spy on everyone without warrant.

The vital question (yes, I'm too lazy to read the bill itself) is whether or not a generic reason is ok.

If you need to specify a reason for each case/individual, that would indeed be a hurdle, because it forces the NSA to actually recognize that individuals exist, not just one big pile of information they can access at will.

Perhaps the AC forgets or does not wish to recall the origins of some of the domestic protections and past efforts to sneak around them:
Project MINARET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The "unconstitutional" covers every aspect of color of law and US general opinions. You dont get to rewrite US law for a few decades due to a stacked generation of legal experts seeing or experiencing 'something' not good.
US constitutional law would then be useless in the real world as every generation of US legal exper

they are not going to stop any of that spying, they are going to collect as much data as possible on as many people as possible, either the bill gets watered down to the point that it is useless, or it gets passed but ignored or a work around renders it useless, those fascist kleptocrats are not giving up anything

There's Security Theater, and now we have Legislative Theater. Arguing about whether the law could have been "better" or "stronger" is just playing their game. IT DOESN"T MATTER what the law is. The ruling class--like every minority ruling class in history--will do whatever it needs to to stay in power.

They aren't, this is all for appearance sake for elections, so that they can say "I voted in favor of privacy reform to protect you" in their political ads, while having done nothing in reality. It is BS.

Term limits for Congress would make the executive branch (NSA) stronger. It would also strengthen staff and lobbyists significantly. If you don't like your old Congressman, vote him out, but don't think about telling me I can't vote for mine. That's not democracy when you want to tell me I can't vote the way I want. Why don't you ask yourself what the real problem you are trying to solve instead of hating on Congressmen.

As true as I know it is, I'm doing my best not to lose total faith in humanity. Let's face it, not even congressmen like having their shit ruffled through, right? I could be wrong, but it remains to be seen.
We'll see how this plays out.

It's also to get everyone to forget about it sooner so the politicians can focus on catering to special interests. "The NSA spying? We took care of that. Now let me explain why we need to deregulate credit card companies."

It is not a step in the right direction. It is window dressing. It is a dress on a pig. It is the a polishing of a turd. The fact that Americans will be OK with this is the EXACT problem. Yours this is the EXACT reaction that the politicians want. The smoke screen has worked. Again.

We need to fire everyone in Washington DC and reform the crap out of everything. Both sides are wrong here - why vote for a flawed by design bill? It only exists for political posturing for elections.

We need to remove the bureaucracy, scrap the tax law and start over, zero base budget every agency, and force everyone in DC to work for an amount that is equal to the mean wage of the nation, since they're supposedly volunteers. On top of that, Obamacare should apply to them and pensions should be removed fo

We need to fire everyone in Washington DC and reform the crap out of everything. Both sides are wrong here - why vote for a flawed by design bill? It only exists for political posturing for elections.

Remember, term limits and "voting out the bastards" doesn't really mean much if lobbying (aka Bribery) is still funding their replacements. We need to fire everyone, and then keep moneyed interests from simply installing newly-bought idiots.

1) Non-person entities cannot donate directly to any candidate or cause, but rather must fund their own "campaigns". If say ATT or Google want to help elect people, they can buy their own damn TV spots. "Google supports Harry Reid for senate".

2) Persons can only contribute directly to campaigns for whom they are eligible to vote. Outside influences and PACS can buy their own damn TV spots (NRA, MoveOn, Koch, etc) "NRA supports Mitch McConnell".

3) All advertising must present, who is the primary sponsor (PAC, Lobbying group, etc) with clear details on contributors. Groups wanting to keep their membership "secret" must display "Secret" prominently in their advertisement. "The ad paid for by Mothers Against Dumb Dads --- SECRET"

1) Non-person entities cannot donate directly to any candidate or cause, but rather must fund their own "campaigns". If say ATT or Google want to help elect people, they can buy their own damn TV spots. "Google supports Harry Reid for senate".

Here's a simpler one: since it's already illegal for foreign individuals to fund US politicians, how about extending the rule to multinational corporations. Unless your company, all employees, and all assets are based in the USA then you don't get to influence the election. If you meet all of these criteria, then you're just an association of people who are eligible to vote, so go ahead.

Ban all campaign, ballot measure, etc. advertising entirely. Write a statement, put it on your webpage, and then shut the fuck up.

What. The. Fuck.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Hehe, this...as well as the bureaucrats. We have a lot of bureaus that don't actually do anything other than hire people and spend money, left over from times when they were actually needed. It's like half the daemons in ubuntu, actually.